1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to medical imaging and, more particularly, to systems and methods for providing automatic change quantification for medical decision support.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Computer-aided automatic change detection and quantification can be applied for computer-aided medical decision support to enable longitudinal studies of patient data. For example, computer-aided automatic change detection and quantification can be applied to support: computer-aided diagnosis; therapy monitoring of surgical, interventional, radiation, drug therapies; and computer-aided drug development and clinical trials.
Registration is the process of alignment of medical imaging data. FIG. 1 illustrates examples of conventional medical image registration results. Image registration using conventional algorithms may result in a “perfect” registration with no change detection (CD) or a reasonable registration with wrong change detection.
A change detection algorithm typically performs registration first and then performs subtraction or other difference operations. Given that these two tasks are mutually dependent, a sequential solution is not optimal and may produce false results. In fact, the purpose of image registration or image fusion is to discard geometrical changes. So there is a “chicken-and-egg” relationship between registration and change detection. In addition, existing solutions for image registration are highly susceptible to motion and algorithmic artifacts.